PART VII THE MISSING INVESTIGATOR
PART VII
THE MISSING INVESTIGATOR
Voter: What was the cause of the United States Civil War?
Nikki Haley: Well, don’t come with an easy question. I mean, I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run, the freedoms in what people could and couldn’t do. What do you think the cause of the Civil War was?
Voter: I’m not running for president. What do you think the cause of the Civil War was?
Nikki Haley: I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are .
. . [answer continues] . . . We need to make sure we do all things so that individuals have the liberties, so that they can have freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to do or be anything they want to be, without government getting in the way.
Voter: In the year 2023, it’s astonishing to me that you answer that question without mentioning the word ‘slavery’.
– Exchange between presidential hopeful Nikki Haley and an unnamed voter in New Hampshire, December 2023
Morgan City, Louisiana
15 October
Morgan City is a dismal place.
It’s dominated by three old iron bridges that run parallel to each other over the Atchafalaya River.
Two of the bridges carry passenger cars while the third, the Berwick Bay Bridge, is a striking ‘vertical-lift’ railway bridge.
To call the place a city is kind.
It looks more like an Old West town that God plonked down on the Gulf Coast to be punished by endless hurricanes and crushing humidity.
Fleets of shrimp boats line the shores. The lingering stink of petroleum wafts over everything. Unless they work there, Morgan City is the kind of town that Americans drive around on a bypass.
The address I had for William Winston—Bill Brewster?—was on the top floor of a 1930s-era two-storey walk-up that backed onto the railway line not far from the Berwick Bay Bridge.
Peeling wallpaper. Linoleum floor in the lobby.
Sticking out of the mailbox for apartment 2C were some letters for Mr W. Winston.
Audrey and I climbed the creaking stairs to the second floor and arrived on a landing.
Two apartments branched off it. Apartment 2C faced the street; 2D overlooked the railway out back.
I pressed the doorbell for 2C. Heard a pinging inside.
No-one answered.
‘Mr Winston . . .’ I said softly, pressing the doorbell again.
Again, nothing.
‘Mr Brewster . . .’ I said.
Shuck-shuck.
The shotgun barrel appeared beside my left ear.
A tall Black man with glasses and a grey beard stood in the doorway of apartment 2D gripping a shotgun aimed at our heads.
Despite the glasses and the beard, I recognised him from the photos I’d seen.
Bill Brewster.
‘Mr Brewster, please, my name is Sam Speedman, I’m a private detect—’
‘How’d you find me! Who do you work for! The Kingmans? The Fishers? The Montpierres?’
‘Trust me, we’re no friends of the Kingmans. Just like they did with you, they want to kill us. We found you through your bourbon—you drink the wheated stuff because of your rye allergy—and the soccer gifts you buy on for your granddaughters. Please, we need to talk to you. We need your help.’
Brewster glared at us long and hard, then he checked the stairwell, searching for more intruders.
‘Fuck. Come inside.’
‘You own both of these apartments?’ I said as we entered 2D.
‘Yeah.’ Bill Brewster closed the door, his gun still aimed at us.
His apartment was spartan yet tidy.
I saw a bottle of Weller bourbon on the kitchen bench—114-proof, wheated—and a soccer ball–shaped gift wrapped in ‘Happy Birthday!’ paper.
And it occurred to me that Brewster wasn’t some bitter, burnt-out fugitive drowning his sorrows in hard liquor. He was a precise, disciplined man living in hiding.
‘I own two houses on my street, too,’ I said, ‘just in case someone comes looking for me.’
‘Sit,’ he growled.
Audrey and I sat on a couch by the window.
‘Talk.’
‘Okay, sure.’
As quickly as I could, I told him about my investigation into LaToya Martyn’s disappearance seven years ago and how it had gone cold; then its revival with the discovery of a baby in a doll after a recent hurricane; how we had spoken to Cyrus Barbin; how I had been warned off by the Kingmans; and how we had found fourteen bodies under a Catholic graveyard south of New Orleans, thirteen in rags plus Art Hillerman.
I concluded with my friend Linc’s brutal murder in Florida by the Kingman family’s head of security and that same man’s recent attempt to kill us.
I spoke plainly and genuinely, as I tend to do.
When I was finished, Bill Brewster was staring at me.
‘You ain’t a regular private detective, are ya?’ he said.
‘I’m a little different from most, yeah.’
‘Do you have any idea what you’ve stumbled onto here?’
‘I think we’ve stumbled onto the same thing you did when you went in search of your four missing sex workers in 1988. The same thing that got you set up with bogus child porn charges and meant you had to flee and live in hiding.’
Brewster looked at the floor. ‘You can’t win this.’
‘We can try.’
‘It ruined my life.’
‘Help us now and I promise we’ll never bother you again,’ I said.
He scowled.
Then with a deep sigh he went over to the kitchen bench and poured himself a shot of his bourbon.
‘All right, what do you want to know?’
‘The lawsuit you filed against Tad Kingman,’ I said. ‘For habeas corpus and peonage. Why’d you do that?’
‘It was the only thing I thought I could do to expose them: a public court filing. But the Kingmans had the judge on their payroll and he suppressed it. Christ, the Kingmans and a clique of other families own almost all of the South.’
‘What other families?’
‘Old families. Blue bloods whose vast landholdings go back to before the Civil War. The Dearborns in Texas. The Fishers in Florida. The Longs in Kentucky and Tennessee. Others in Arkansas and Mississippi. And, of course, the Montpierres in Alabama, although when Clara Montpierre married Tad Kingman, Louisiana and Alabama essentially became one giant estate.’
‘In a few days, the Kingman and Dearborn families are going to be joined in marriage: Tad Kingman’s second son, Beau, is -marrying Misty Dearborn,’ I said.
‘Yeah, I read about that online. It’s a big deal,’ Brewster said.
Audrey shook her head. ‘Can you hear yourselves? You make this sound like medieval kingdoms uniting in marriage.’
‘That’s exactly what it is,’ Brewster said. ‘Only these kingdoms, these hereditary fortunes, exist in secret, invisible to the modern world of mass media and open democracy.’
As he said this, I recalled Clara Kingman’s words:
‘We come from a society that is not like your modern, urban world. It exists alongside that world.’
I leaned forward.
‘Old landed Southern families. A mysterious collection of captive Black people at a remote Catholic property. Cells in a mine in Florida that show use in the 60s, 80s and early 2000s. Young Black women who’ve mysteriously been going missing for over a hundred and fifty years, followed by the investigators who searched for them: it suggests that whoever takes these women doesn’t want to be exposed. ’
Brewster nodded. ‘This is what you’re up against.’
‘And what is that?’
‘An empire, Mr Speedman. An invisible empire of wealthy slaveholders. Indeed, a century ago, that’s exactly what the Ku Klux Klan called itself: The Invisible Empire. That’s what you’ve stumbled onto. That’s why they ruined my life and it’s also why they will not stop until they kill you.’
The empire.
It was the same term Cyrus Barbin had used to describe whoever was undoubtedly going to kill Audrey and me.
‘An empire of slaveholders?’ I said. ‘Wealthy slaveholders? In the present day?’
My conversation with Clara Kingman again flashed across my mind:
‘Our way of life derives from an older time, a more godly time.’
‘You’re talking about the Confederacy? The Southern states that waged war to preserve slavery?’
‘Our ancestors fought with honour and courage to defend a certain way of life, one that speaks of things like respect, decorum, and of showing kindnesses.’
‘It started with convict leasing,’ Brewster said.
‘After the Civil War, wealthy Southern families that had owned slaves simply began leasing convicts from state prisons to work on their plantations and in their mines. It was literally the same work. The convict leasing system continued for sixty years, but somewhere over that period, records were conveniently lost and convicts held under leases on isolated properties, with no way of contacting the world, just . . . became slaves again.’
‘Goddamn,’ Audrey said. ‘Why would they do this? These rich families?’
‘Because they can,’ Brewster said. ‘I think it’s a way for them to thumb their noses at the North, to know that in one key way, they actually won the Civil War.’
I said, ‘Cyrus Barbin was convicted of hunting and killing three Black men. He was part of that world of wealthy old Southern families. When he was caught by the cops he said it was “his right as a white man” to hunt Black men. Do you think in his youth he hunted Black slaves on old properties like these?’
‘That’s likely, yes.’
‘Holy shit,’ Audrey said.
‘What about the women like LaToya?’ I asked. ‘Why take them?’
Brewster threw a look at Audrey, suddenly hesitant.
‘Speak,’ Audrey said sharply. ‘I can handle it.’
Brewster said, ‘I never figured out why they originally took my four women in ’88, but I had an idea why they kept them.’
‘Yes?’
‘They kept them as breeders. To breed more slaves,’ Brewster said. ‘That’s what made slaves the most sought-after asset in the old South. A child born to a slave immediately became a slave itself.’
‘But slavery is illegal now!’ Audrey exclaimed.
‘Not if no-one knows about it,’ I said.
‘Exactly,’ Brewster agreed.
‘Oh, this is fucked up . . .’ Audrey said.
I had so many questions.